ANC’s former youth leader Julius Malema is a magnific example of the guy who fell from the grace disgracefully and quickly altogether. During his heyday, the name Malema sufficed to remove or put you behind the bar. As a youth wing leader, Malema was president in his own light. He had the ear and the mind of the president. Therefore, he was able to access preferential financial goodies simply because he was the cadre of ANC, South Africa’s ruling and bullying party so to speak.

Those who remember how instrumental Machiavellian Malema was in bringing down former President Thabo Mbeki are still baffled to see the mess Malema is currently in. Again, Malema created his downfall after thinking that he’d use Zuma, who used him to attain more power. For Malema it was simple. If unschooled Zuma would topple a literati like Mbeki, why not him (Malema) who is more educated than Zuma? Malema’s predicaments show how dirty African politics are especially when those behind it are ultra-opportunists and gullible. Who would expect Jacob Zuma to boot Malema out mercilessly and quickly like that? Media has it that Malema’s quickly and dubiously attained wealth is now quickly up for the grab after he’s implicated in tax evasion and presenting false documents to acquire loans from public financial institutions.

The secret is now open that Malema amassed wealth illegally thanks to being in the upper echelons of power. It came to light that Malema is now facing bankruptcy after evading tax at the tune of millions of Rand.

Like Cyrus Jirongo and William Ruto (Kenya), Charles Ble Goude (Ivory Coast who is now behind the bar), Emanuel Nchimbi (Tanzania current powerful minister who is oft-accused of acquiring fake degrees, but authorities never dealt with these allegations) and other youth leaders in the continent, Malema washed his hands and dined and wined with kings. Once this happens, someone becomes infallible and all his sins are shelved, till when he tries to be smart by stabbing or betraying his master.

All those mentioned former youth leaders are either influential in the politics in their countries, or have influential positions in the governments, or are richer than they were supposed to be, if not disgraced for those who happen to try to become free.

Being a youth leader, Malema a school dropout, became a force to be reckoned with due to the fact that he was the head of youths who make up a big chunk of the population in almost all African countries. Normally, shrewd African rulers use youths and women as their vehicles to get to power. They wisely know how these two groups are comprised of the majority of voters they need badly when the time comes. This is what happened when Jacob Zuma wanted to ousted Mbeki. By then Malema was among the high and mighty that no law could touch or handle adversely, until the time he fell out with Zuma.

Experience has shown that many shrewd politicians who aim at becoming president prefer to use illiterate, Machiavellian or semi-illiterate youth leaders to make it to the top as it was in the case of Malema. Now that Malema is in hot soup as he cascades down to political oblivion, he is left alone facing all types of problems real and manmade.

Sometimes youth leaders, as stooges of those who use them to do their dirty laundry, became aware of the dirty role they play so as to rebel. When this happens chances are that they end up being pulled down so as to disappear in oblivion as it happened in the case of Malema. Hadn’t Malema turned against his masters, all these woes Malema is in now would not have seen the light of the day. When they turned against their masters they had either to sink or float all depending on the results of this fallout. Ruto for example, was able to use former president Daniel arap Moi to reach where he now, while Malema was used by Zuma to end up in troubles just like Ble Goude who went under with his boss Laurent Gbgbo.

In a nutshell, Malema’s plight-cum-flight to the apogee and bottom of power in South Africa should act as an eye opener for African youths, especially the way they are used by corrupt and shrewd politicians and opportunists to achieve their goals, while they just exploit and dump youth just like eggshells.

I want to thank you for your comment’s. Let’s continue to grow and learn.

I want to introduce another film today. This can offer just one perspective on African Diaspora in South Africa. I personally couldn’t have made the journey without the support of the producers of the movie called, Blacks Without Borders. Thank you to Stafford & Judith Bailey.

I had several questions about South Africa and they put me in contact with other African Diaspora who are in the country or were in the country. My comments, questions, concerned, and pitfalls that I should avoid were answered.

I am still in contact with many of the people in the movie. They often call or write me just to see if I doing well or if I need anything. Many of them live in Johannesburg, South Africa, but I have been blessed to meet a few of them face to face in Cape Town, South Africa.

Please enjoy the movie (click on the image).

As stated in the earlier post, this is another viewpoint, but what I hope we can all do, no matter where you are from or who are, is to network with one another. We are all going to have different views, opinions, and aspirations, but I hope that we can elevate each other.

I’m Not Black, I’m Coloured – Identity Crisis at the Cape of Good Hope

Greeting’s Everyone,

First, I need to thank Cedric McCay for bringing this video to my attention. He is a great person and I was trying to learn French from him, but I failed miserably. Cedric is an advocate to “Embrace culture, Serve humanity. 1914. Share Africa’s wisdom. Enjoy God’s gift of Life. Bilingue et intéressé par les événements en Afrique et en Caraïbes!”.

I encourage everyone to watch this video. It has affected me personally because being an African-American who lives in Cape Town, South Africa, I am understanding the social dynamics of this country and this coastal city.

I arrived in Cape Town, South Africa in June of 2012. I was excited, nervous, and curious to be moving to my third country.

I love it here in Cape Town, South Africa! You can certainly be successful here! It is interesting to see how much of the Black South African population follows the American hip-hop community. I am treated well. They ask me questions about Rick Ross, 50 Cent, and other artist. People will call me, “Obama”, while I walk down the street. I have to admit that was interesting for me.

However, in the beginning of my arrival, I had an interesting time because of the racial dynamics in the country. The black South Africans would just look at stare at me. Most were extremely friendly, but I did have a few that just gave me a dirty look. I didn’t understand the situtaion. I asked a good friend that I met in South Africa about the situation that I described. She stated, “Oh! You didn’t know? You one of us! You are Coloured”. She further stated that she new I was an American once I started to talk.

My mistake in this lesson was that I applied my knowledge of race and identity from the United States of America and applied the ideology to my situation in South Africa. Big mistake by me, but I learned from it.

As humans, we all desire to be part of a group or identity. South Africa is a great country and it has deep roots in regards to Race & Identity. This movie was made in 2009 and things have slowly changed, but in my opinion, the Identity crisis continues.

I saw this documentary on Sis Deb’s blog. Knowledgeable and inspiring!

I also added this comment to her post:

Sis Deb, thanks for posting this. I had not heard of this documentary before and I was certainly “shaking my head in the affirmative” throughout. I was inspired by the hard work, sacrifice and tenacity of the people profiled. I celebrate all their successes, professional and personal.

As a people we need engage in all sectors of an economy and not [only] ghetto-ize ourselves in the arts or social services [I should have also added “sports” in this list]. We can all use our talents to contribute to our overall advancement. However, like all people everywhere, there are those of us who are in it only for themselves and although it may not be right, from a collective perspective, it’s okay, ’cause regardless of these selfish individuals, if we keep our eyes on the collective prize and do the work, we can make a positive difference in the actual and real lives of others.

In order to put this article into its proper perspective, Chinweizu informs us thus:

“It was miseducation which sought to withold from me the memory of our true African past and to substitute instead an ignorant shame for whatever travesties Europe chose to represent as African Past. It was miseducation which sought to quarantine me from all influences, ancient as well as contemporary, which did not emanate from, or meet with the imperial approval of, western “civilization.” It was a miseducation which, by encouraging me to glorify all things European and by teaching me a low esteem for and negative attitudes towards things African, sought to cultivate in me that kind of inferiority complex which drives a perfectly fine right foot to strive to mutilate itself into a left foot. It was a miseducation full of gaps and misleading pictures: it sought to structure my eyes to see the world in the imperialist way of seeing the world; it sought to internalize in my consciousness the values of the colonizers; it sought to train me to automatically uphold and habitually employ the colonizers’ viewpoint in all matters, in the strange belief that their racist, imperialist, anti-African interest is the universal, humanist interest, and in a strange belief that the view defined by their ruthless greed is the rational, civilized view. And by such terms of supposed praise as “advanced,” “detribalized,” and getting to be quite civilized,” it sought to co-opt my sympathies and make contemptuous of examining what it should have been my duty to change and alleviate. For it was a distracting miseducation which tried in every way to avoid questions that were important to me and to the collective African condition. It tried to maneuver me away from asking them; it tried to keep me from probing them most thoroughly; it tried instead to preoccupy me with other matters. But the had realities of the Black (African) Condition kept insisting that I ask: Where did our poverty, our material backwardness, our cultural inferiority complexes begin and why? And why do they persist in spite of political independence?”

If the reader has read the whole quote up to here, Chinweizu is more than relevant here. He covers all the issues we have raised and tells us what to do in reconstructing African history, all the issues raised herein, affected everything about him and the world and real-reality he lives in day in and day out. What Chinweizu is discussing above, is what has been the Achilles heel of African progress and development in various ways.

Unlearning the Narcotized Colonial Miseducation

Chinweizu, true to form, delves even much deeper into his soliloquy in the following manner:

“When I turned to the official explainers and interpreters, and to the expert and benevolent meliorists of our condition, and asked for a flash of light, they wrapped my head instead with a shroud of double-talk and evasions; they thrust my head into a garbage dump of facts, facts and more bits and pieces of facts which merely confused me the more by their (deliberately?) disorganized abundance; they punctured the membranes of my ears with slogans, distinctions without preferences, smart phrases which brightly and engagingly misled; they offered me tools, supposedly analytic, which mauled what they claimed to explain, and left me constipated with jargon and dazed with confusion. The experience was thoroughly disillusioning. In my pain I began to suspect that my mind had been, over the years, held prisoner in a den where intellectual opiates were served me by official schools, by approved lists of books, by the blatant as well as subliminal propaganda of films, and by an overwhelming assortment of media controlled by interests inimical to, and justifiably scared of a true and thorough-going African Nationalism. Suspecting that the glittering phalanx of experts spoke to my colonizers and their imperial interests, I felt that, even though I was not an “expert” in these fields, I should nevertheless conduct my own investigation into the origins and circumstances of the deplorable African stasis, learning the necessary skills “on the job” as it were.”

The article above has been pointing out to the ‘self-appointed’ experts that have given themselves the task of explaining to the world, and on the internet what they ‘think’ they know about Africans in South Africa. In this article I contended that these so-called pros know nothing about the Africans of South Africa, and proceeded to breakdown these custom and cultures to make the point that African, South African History, culture, customs, tradition and so on are not static nor non-existence, but, as according to the definition I utilized from Hall and Wilson, to gave us a definition of Culture, which it turns out is right down the pike it was with the culture of the Nguni/Bakone I have written about in this article. This was in an effort to aid Africans to begin to unlearn colonial history and learn their history anew and in a much more informed way and manner. After Chinweizu realized and learned that he can teach himself to morph into his own written account, educating himself about himself and his people anew, made him realized that by thinking so, and was ready to unlearn what he called the “narcotic colonized education” he had to overcome the challenges of deconstructing the Master’s history and rewriting and recreating his own history in his own image and people. This is how Chinweizu addresses this part of the discourse I am talking above in the paragraph below:

“My official education was over. The overthrow of the allegiances programmed into me by it was in swift progress; but there were vital things I still had to learn-things they did not and would not teach me in school; things they would, if they could, keep me from coming into contact with even outside school; things in order to appreciate which I had to painfully unlearn much of what they had instilled in me at school. And so I began a journey of the mind; a journey by a mind thoroughly alienated from its imperialized miseducation. And the purpose of this journey was first to seek out the roots of the Black Condition within which my mind suffered. By the way, if any should think inappropriate my discussing colonial education through imagery of opium narcotics, let them consider that the British, from 1839 to 1842, waged war on China in order to force the Chinese to buy opium which her Britannic Christian Majesty’s imperial agents grew in India. Victory in the Opium War earned the British the “right” to addict so many Chinese to opium that much of the population, nodding and half asleep all the time, was supinely amenable to Western cultural aggression and imperialist manipulation. Now, if they could go that far, why should their use of intellectual opium to subdue, for the same ends, some other unlucky victims seem incredible and outlandish?”

We catch-up with Chinweizu after much articulation as to his transformation out of being ‘narcotically miseducated by the colonizers’, to being influenced by the Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Pablo Neruda of Chile, Malcolm X, Julius Nyerere, Mbonu Ojike, Aime Cesaire, Hamidou Kane, and so forth, to better understand the origins of the African stasis and to the task of understanding the workings of the system, which maintained the deplorable Black Condition saying that “these have been and remain my teachers and my guides as I continue my efforts to cleanse myself of the pollutions from a colonial miseducation.”

We further learn from Chinweizu who clearly states that:

“Having listened to them, I would heed no more, and would more emphatically reject, the pious, self-serving propaganda given out as official and objective truth by the imperialist party. For I no longer believe the official voices of the West. They do not speak for the interests of the imperialized. I now realize that these “official husbanders of my consciousness” would take incredible pains to hide from me even elementary things, the better to conceal all clues that might lead me to correct answers to questions provoked by the Black condition. I have decided to listen closely to voices from the imperialized world, to share experiences and insights with them. What the voices from the imperialized world say, and some are anti-imperialist voices within the West say, continue to make sense to me as I try to understand our specific conditions.”

Citing Chinweizu at such length is very important for the political/social historical theory for the presently dysfunctional people of South Africa. Learning and reading up on such works such as these presented by Chiweizu and those who are at the front of the African struggle and liberation, they who spin history to be user-friendly for the oppressed, in the process imparting knowledge and ways and means and new ways of learning and thinking about what he calls the “Black Condition”, are important links for Africans to use to manipulate and meander through all the obstacles that are thrown their way, whenever they try to unlearn what Chinweizu calls “narcotized colonized miseducation”. At this juncture, we take some lesson from Chinweizu when he sutures, tightly, his argument and reasons as to why and how we should unlearn this devious form of miseducation of Africans by the West. Chiweizu finally points out that:

“If my experience of it is at all representative, colonial miseducation is something its victims need to cure themselves of. And this is not easy to do. We are all, I believe, rather a little like colonized boy who, we are told, had learned from his colonized milieu to be ashamed of his local Africans weather. In our efforts to wash from our consciousness the harmful pollutants deposited there by our colonial miseducation, we are apt to act like the child who rubs his/her belly endlessly with soap and water, doesn’t touch any other part of his body, and when he tires of it all, runs to his/her mother to announce that he/she has taken a bath. Clearly we need something like a communal metal bath, one which we shall scrub the crud off one another’s backs, and especially from those corners which our hands cannot thoroughly scour. I believe that even a layman ought to share his results with others, so we can move more rapidly to a deeper, more thorough, and more useful appreciation of our collective condition.”

Chinweizu trudges on:

“If we wait for our official experts, who knows when, if ever, they will dare feel free, or find it profitable, to talk candidly and intelligently to us? For there are three sorts of experts: those for our liberation, those against our liberation, and those who contrive to appear to be on our side while they are indeed subtly working against our liberation. Advice from an expert who is not on your side, or from one who is against you, can be far worse than no expert advice at all. The layman, I believe, ought therefore to be very discriminating in choosing what expert to heed. It is, in every situation, very much like choosing a lawyer. For there are some experts, some Africans included, who deeply cherish the privileges that go with defending or furthering the interests of the imperialists. Under the guise of professionalism, of offering objective advice, some will subtly legislate against, or turn the unwary client away, from things that are in the client’s interest; some will gloss over differences that matter; some will conceal facts or omit considerations that are vital. Because of these kinds of experts genuinely on the client’s side are as capable of honest error as anyone, the client ought always to exercise vigilance and common sense in taking advice from experts. For eternal vigilance, in all matters, especially over the minutest details, is still the price of liberty.”

Given the psychic and ideological foundation of our subjugation, of both the colonial subjugation from which we thought we had escaped and the neocolonial form that has manacled us, any spirited drive for genuine freedom must begin with a thorough critique of the bourgeoise culture that has made us captives; of the process and content of the modernization that has lured us into captivity; and of the relation, if any, between technological modernization and the Christian bourgeois culture. It is precisely the existence of such a milieu that is retarding African progress today, because these petty-bourgeois elite who kowtow and pander to the West and are flinging themselves pell-mell into its orb, disregarding any protestations nor opposition that stems from its African voting polity, as in the case of Africans in South Africa.

According to Chinweizu, we should be circumspect of experts, all of those pretenders and false analysts who make out as if they have African people’s interests at heart, meanwhile, behind the scenes (mentally or otherwise) scurrilously fleece you to the marrow of your soul by denouncing every little thing about one, in order to dominate and confuse you. This is how Chinweizu concludes this matter:

“In exercising our rights as citizens, and in meeting our obligations to examine, discuss and pronounce upon all matters that affect our general welfare, we are bound to come up against the resistance of that kind of expert who rises up in arms whenever a layman “trespasses” on his “jargon-fenced bailiwick”. Such experts, while misinterpreting facts and gerrymandering arguments, are prone to mount some high pedestal of laurels and reputation, and from there demand the “intruder’s” credentials, in hopes or overawing him into irresponsible silence,or intimidating him/her into acquiescing in arrant nonsense.”

Chinweizu concludes thusly:

“In such situations, it is perhaps prudent to remind oneself that the loftiest credentials have never been a barrier to uttering nonsense; nor is a total lack of credentials a barrier to talking sense. A decolonized and re-educated African ought always to demand that matters be explained from an Afro-centric viewpoint, with scientific tools, and that the results be translated into intelligible common sense. By so insisting, we enable ourselves to spot and avoid ideologies, open as well as hidden, by which we are liable to be confused and misled, and attractive myths by which we are liable to be tricked and lynched en masse.”

We need to raise our level of vigilance, read and know our history, find ways and means to get it from FB to the man in the street who has no such knowledge or awareness and expounded upon by Chinweizu; be able to break down these advices to be in tandem with the understand, needs and relevance to the the poor Africans of South Africa. This is the job of all those who are reading this posted piece now to take it from here and make it reach the people, or print it to give it to the ordinary and poor people in community who do not have access to computers. We need to begin to use FB to inform and form positive dialogues with our poor masses who are denied such knowledge; we should not only boast about the fact that we are the only one who know this type of information, we should make it possible for the children, youth and elderly to have access to this information, whatever it takes. We, as Africans of South Africa, are much more better than what we are now experiencing and facing as a people.

The murder of 34 miners by the South African police, most of them shot in the back, puts paid to the illusion of post-apartheid democracy and illuminates the new worldwide apartheid of which South Africa is both an historic and contemporary model.

In 1894, long before the infamous Afrikaans word foretold “separate development” for the majority people of South Africa, an Englishman, Cecil John Rhodes, oversaw the Glen Grey Act in what was then the Cape Colony. This was designed to force blacks from agriculture into an army of cheap labour, principally for the mining of newly discovered gold and other precious minerals. As a result of this social Darwinism, Rhodes’ own De Beers company quickly developed into a world monopoly, making him fabulously rich. In keeping with liberalism in Britain and the United States, he was celebrated as a philanthropist supporting high-minded causes.

Today, the Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University is prized among liberal elites. Successful Rhodes scholars must demonstrate “moral force of character” and “sympathy for and protection of the weak, and unselfishness, kindliness and fellowship”. The former president Bill Clinton is one, General Wesley Clark, who led the Nato attack on Yugoslavia, is another. The wall known as apartheid was built for the benefit of the few, not least the most ambitious of the bourgeoisie.

This was something of a taboo during the years of racial apartheid. South Africans of British descent could indulge an apparent opposition to the Boers’ obsession with race, and their contempt for the Boers themselves, while providing the facades behind which an inhumane system guaranteed privileges based on race and, more importantly, on class.

The new black elite in South Africa, whose numbers and influence had been growing steadily during the latter racial apartheid years, understood the part they would play following “liberation”. Their “historic mission”, wrote Frantz Fanon in his prescient classic The Wretched of the Earth, “has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism rampant though camouflaged”.

This applied to leading figures in the African National Congress, such as Cyril Ramaphosa, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, now a corporate multi-millionaire, who negotiated a power-sharing “deal” with the regime of de F.W. Klerk, and Nelson Mandela himself, whose devotion to an “historic compromise” meant that freedom for the majority from poverty and inequity was a freedom too far. This became clear as early as 1985 when a group of South African industrialists led by Gavin Reilly, chairman of the Anglo-American mining company, met prominent ANC officials in Zambia and both sides agreed, in effect, that racial apartheid would be replaced by economic apartheid, known as the “free market”.

Secret meetings subsequently took place in a stately home in England, Mells Park House, at which a future president of liberated South Africa, Tabo Mbeki, supped malt whisky with the heads of corporations that had shored up racial apartheid. The British giant Consolidated Goldfields supplied the venue and the whisky. The aim was to divide the “moderates” – the likes of Mbeki and Mandela – from an increasingly revolutionary multitude in the townships who evoked memories of uprisings following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and at Soweto in 1976 – without ANC help.

Once Mandela was released from prison in 1990, the ANC’s “unbreakable promise” to take over monopoly capital was seldom heard again. On his triumphant tour of the US, Mandela said in New York: “The ANC will re-introduce the market to South Africa.” When I interviewed Mandela in 1997 – he was then president – and reminded him of the unbreakable promise, I was told in no uncertain terms that “the policy of the ANC is privatisation”.

Enveloped in the hot air of corporate-speak, the Mandela and Mbeki governments took their cues from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. While the gap between the majority living beneath tin roofs without running water and the newly wealthy black elite in their gated estates became a chasm, finance minister Trevor Manuel was lauded in Washington for his “macro-economic achievements”. South Africa, noted George Soros in 2001, had been delivered into “the hands of international capital”.

Shortly before the massacre of miners employed for a pittance in a dangerous, British-registered platinum mine, the erosion of South Africa’s economic independence was demonstrated when the ANC government of Jacob Zuma stopped importing 42 per cent of its oil from Iran under intense pressure from Washington. The price of petrol has already risen sharply, further impoverishing people.

This economic apartheid is now replicated across the world as poor countries comply with the demands of western “interests” as opposed to their own. The arrival of China as a contender for the resources of Africa, though without the economic and military threats of America, has provided further excuse for American military expansion, and the possibility of world war, as demonstrated by President Barack Obama’s recent arms and military budget of $737.5 billion, the biggest ever. The first African-American president of the land of slavery presides over a perpetual war economy, mass unemployment and abandoned civil liberties: a system that has no objection to black or brown people as long as they serve the right class. Those who do not comply are likely to be incarcerated.

This is the South African and American way, of which Obama, son of Africa, is the embodiment. Liberal hysteria that the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is more extreme than Obama is no more than a familiar promotion of “lesser evilism” and changes nothing. Ironically, the election of Romney to the White House is likely to reawaken mass dissent in the US, whose demise is Obama’s singular achievement.

Although Mandela and Obama cannot be compared – one is a figure of personal strength and courage, the other a pseudo political creation — the illusion that both beckoned a new world of social justice is similar. It belongs to a grand illusion that relegates all human endeavour to a material value, and confuses media with information and military conquest with humanitarian purpose. Only when we surrender these fantasies shall we begin to end apartheid across the world.